Thursday, April 9, 2009

Why WASP isn't free

The good

I'm receiving tons of positive feedback about WASP, the community of over 10,000 users is providing great ideas and suggestions which I'm carefully taking into consideration. I'm very proud of this tool. I've spent countless nights and weekends working on it over a period of 18 months.

But WASP isn't just the result of this hard work, it's also the culmination of over 20 years of experience ranging from development, system administration, DBA, web development, analytics, and about every aspects of launching a business.

The bad

Over the years I've been known to be very "verbal" about my opinions. I have matured and grown some (a lot!) of gray hair. I think my temper is much better than it was years ago, but when I receive something like this... it hurts:

My suggestion is to take WASP extension off your "Free Ressources" (sic) page, or perhaps change the name of that page.

It's a shame you no longer offer a free version that doesn't time-out since it's clearly the crawler that is the power-tool aimed at WDAs. We have a bunch of staff who every now-and-again need to check an Omniture variable or two to help in locating reports, but will never require a crawler.

Oh well, bon chance!

I wish I could talk to this person, who knows, maybe he or she will read this and get in touch?

Did you know?

Lots of people think there's a whole business behind WASP. In fact, it's the result of a single person's dedication and passion for web analytics: me! I'm doing a mix of consulting, teaching and developing WASP because I like what I do, working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. I'm a strong advocate of sharing and collaboration. But I'm not stupid either.

My take

Here's what comes to mind:

20 minutes is plenty of time for occasional use and seeing if WASP is useful, clearly, this person wants to use WASP for professional purposes, and he or she is not alone, there's also a 'bunch of staff" using WASP...

If $49 USD is too much for you, than stick to a manual method, use debuggers and proxies (the license of most of those tools isn't free, btw), or use the free Omniture JavaScript debugger

WASP ROI is pretty straightforward: save time, eliminate non-value added activities, increase your knowledge. And that person tells me it's not worth 49$!? The crawler including in WASP Pro, at $499, is a tiny fraction of the cost of alternative solutions...

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Innovator, speaker and renowned digital analytics consultant, Stéphane Hamel was named "Most Influential Industry Contributor" by the Digital Analytics Association in 2013. Strong of over twenty-five years’ experience empowering organizations to analyze and optimize their online channels, he has cemented his position as a leading voice for digital analytics and online optimization.

Mr. Hamel holds an MBA in eBusiness and lectured several web analytics and business analysis courses at Laval University and UBC Continuing Studies.